


Beren and Finrod in the Great Outdoors

by Hepatica_is_no_Forest_Child



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - College/University, Backpacking in the Alps, Damn can Luthien sing, F/M, Gen, Modern AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-03
Updated: 2018-09-03
Packaged: 2019-07-06 15:55:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15889239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hepatica_is_no_Forest_Child/pseuds/Hepatica_is_no_Forest_Child
Summary: Beren is hoping for a relaxing summer backpacking across Europe with his best friend. Unfortunately for him, Sauron (and the weather) get in the way. Fortunately for him, his girlfriend is a badass.





	Beren and Finrod in the Great Outdoors

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written for the 2018 Tolkien Reverse Summer Bang, and therefore has fanart! It was created by Ohlurr on tumblr and you can check it out here: http://ohlurr.tumblr.com/post/177714783630/my-art-for-the-lovely-fic-beren-and-finrod-in-the  
> It is the author's first fic, and feedback is greatly appreciated.

Beren took a deep breath of mountain air as he watched the bus drive away. It had taken three buses, two trains, and a plane to get here, but now he was here, backpack on his back, best friend at his side, ready to backpack the Alps. They stood at the trailhead that would take them up to the famous Via Alpina. The mountains soared above their heads, and not for the first time in his life, Beren wondered how he could have gotten so lucky.  
He had always been into hiking as a kid; the great outdoors were his home. His parents owned a mountain guide company in the White Mountains in New Hampshire, and he had been accompanying them since he could walk. Their death in a mountaineering accident when Beren was thirteen hadn’t turned him away from the wilderness but instead pushed him further into it. Hiking the Alps was a lifelong dream.  
Beren was shaken from his reverie by Finrod, who had a butterfly perched on one outstretched finger and was telling him something about its wings. “They don’t even belong at this altitude, but isn’t this one lovely?” Finrod asked, attention wholly absorbed by the butterfly.  
Beren smiled at Finrod and his butterfly. His best friend was constantly befriending animals. “It is lovely, but we should probably get started or we won’t reach the hut by dark,” he said, gesturing towards the trail. Finrod nodded enthusiastically. “Right. Hiking!” he set the butterfly gently on a nearby plant and started off up the trail. Beren followed, a little leery of his friend’s excitement. Finrod wasn’t the sort of person you would automatically pick as a hiking buddy. He tended to wander the streets of Abenthey, where they went to university, in designer outfits, gleaming blonde hair perfectly coiffed, a brilliantly white smile on his handsome face. He looked like a French model, plucked from the pages of Vogue and transported to a small Scottish town. That was, until he spoke, revealing the poshest accent Beren’s American ears had ever heard. Somewhere along the line, he had let slip that his father was an Earl, and he was technically a Viscount.  
It had taken Beren three days to recover from the shock. He knew that the University of Abenthey was a promenading ground for the children of Europe’s rich and famous, but it also had a fantastic medical school that offered scholarships to American students who committed to working for charitable organizations outside of the US for three years, an offer that Beren had gladly accepted. He would be a doctor far faster at Abenthey than he would be if he stayed in the US, since in the UK, medicine was an undergraduate degree. The fact that he might end up rubbing shoulders with nobility hadn’t even factored into his thoughts. The fact that he was spending his freshman summer backpacking the Alps with his best friend (who was a Viscount) and stopping for a week to visit his girlfriend, who was the most beautiful, brilliant, magical, (and completely mystifying) woman he had ever met, was still unreal to him. It felt as though he had been transported into someone else’s life and was desperately trying to pretend that he knew what was going on. 

 

To Beren’s surprise and relief, the first week passed without any major mishaps.  
That wasn’t to say there weren’t mishaps. The first night in the hikers’ hut, they had run into a group of English uni students who Beren could only describe as “lads.” They seemed more concerned with sampling all the local beers than actually enjoying nature, and kept everyone else up half the night by starting a loud, drunken argument about football. When Finrod went out to try and diffuse the disagreement (or at least convince them to take it outside), he found himself confronted by several large, angry, extremely drunk men, who heard his accent and immediately rounded on him.  
“Who’re you to tell me to quiet down, ya posh wanker?”  
“Oh, posh boy needs his beauty sleep, does he?”  
“I simply think that your volume level is a little excessive, gentlemen,” Finrod said, in his most placating tone of voice. “I think everyone would be grateful if you took your carousing outside.”  
“Excessive? I’ll show you excessive, prissy bastard! Fuck off!”

The next morning, Beren begged some ice from the hut manager and handed a makeshift icepack to Finrod, who was sporting a spectacular black eye. Oddly, it didn’t ruin his good looks at all, something Beren tried hard not be resentful of. Finrod was strangely cheerful about the whole thing.  
“I’ve never been in a fight before,” he said, poking at his bruised face speculatively. “This trip is already full of new experiences.”  
Beren restrained himself from pointing out that being punched once by a drunk man was hardly the definition of a fight. Instead, he listened to Finrod ramble about topics ranging from the diversity of flora in the valley they were walking through to the mating habits of the bombus cullumanus to the history of the Roman Empire in this part of Austria.  
Beren had once asked Finrod how he knew so much about so many different subjects. He had shrugged. “The benefits of British public schooling,” he said. “I know lots of useless nonsense that no one else finds interesting.” This statement had only further confused Beren, whose own public schooling in the US had had the opposite effect, until Finrod explained that public school in the UK was what Americans called private school, and that his school had been extremely posh. Or at least, that was what Beren assumed, since he had mentioned having to wear tailcoats to class. He remembered meeting Finrod for the first time, in their freshman dorm room in St. Tilion’s Hall. He had been convinced that his roommate would hate him. But Finrod, as he often did, defied all explanation. 

September of the previous year…  
Beren glanced around his new dorm room. Somehow, he had expected it to be more… remarkable. This was one of the UK’s top universities, and everyone made such a big deal over the old buildings, which were admittedly beautiful, but this was a plain, normal-looking room. It was far nicer than the concrete cells he had been offered by the US universities he had gotten into, but nothing was gilded, which was a sort of a vague disappointment. Not that he really wanted to live in a gold room anyway, he realized. But it would have been a funny photo to send to his Venture Crew buddies. He assumed he had a roommate, since there were two sets of furniture in the room, one of which was now occupied by his meagre possessions, but the university had been disconcertingly vague about both this and pretty much everything else. He couldn’t tell if it was one of those British things he would just have to get used to, or if this particular university just didn’t have its shit together.  
Now that he was unpacked, however, he sat on his bed, unsure of what to do next. He didn’t have any parents to farewell, and his parents’ friends who he had nominally lived with during high school had been too busy with work to fly over with him. He was used to being alone, and it hadn’t bothered him until now, when he was left sitting on his new bed on the other side of the ocean and wondering what happened next.  
He wondered what his parents would say, if they had been here to see their only child off to university. He imagined their smiling faces, beaming at him with pride. He smiled back into the empty room, and just for a moment, he felt as if they were really there.  
That was, until the door swung open, announcing the arrival of his roommate. Finrod strolled in as if he owned the place, pushing up his designer sunglasses as he looked around the room before turning to someone hidden behind the open door and proclaiming, “It’s lovely! Kindly bring up my bags.”  
Then he turned the full force of his blindingly beautiful smile on Beren and said with considerable enthusiasm, “You must be my roommate! Ingoldo Arafinwinion,” he said, holding out his hand for Beren to shake, “But you can call me Finrod.”  
Beren did his best to smile back, although maintaining any sort of facial expression was difficult under the full force of Finrod’s personality, looks, and accent. “Beren Barahirsson,” he said, “Pleased to meet you.”  
Just as Beren was thinking that maybe his roommate, who seemed both very English and potentially very gay, though it was hard to tell, might just be a very good-looking, charismatic guy and not some sort of vaguely inhuman trust-fund scion, Finrod’s luggage arrived. Actually, it was more accurate to say that Finrod’s luggage began to arrive, as it continued arriving for several more minutes, carried into the room by a pair of well-muscled, discreetly uniformed men who looked as though they would happily kill him for a corn chip. As the pile of designer luggage (At least Beren assumed it was designer, he was fairly certain he’d seen that logo in the windows of one of the high-end shops he’d strolled past on one of his occasional trips to Boston and New York) grew higher and higher, Beren became very glad that he had brought so little, as it was extremely obvious that Finrod was going to need 80% of the room’s rather paltry storage space. Eventually, the bags stopped coming, and Finrod dismissed his helpers, magnanimously proclaiming that he would unpack his bags himself. Beren had sat silently on his bed for this entire process, trying not to be in the way or attract the attention of any of the other people in the room. It wasn’t difficult; Beren was excellent at sitting, motionless, waiting for animals to become comfortable around him and accept him as part of the environment. Hopefully he could do the same thing with his frankly terrifying new roommate and he’d just fade into the background and not be subjected to the unrelenting gleam of that incredibly white smile. So he sat unmoving on his bed and watched Finrod emptying suitcase after suitcase full of clothing, shoes, and accessories. The contents of one of those suitcases probably cost more than everything he owned. Even including his climbing gear, which hadn’t come cheap.  
Eventually, it became clear through watching Finrod that while he may have had a two-man murder crew to do his heavy lifting, he had no idea how to fold clothes in a way that wouldn’t cause them to wrinkle. Beren couldn’t bear to watch him half-fold, half-crumple his clothes into his wardrobe any longer. He felt compelled to help this man, who despite having a blinding smile, clearly had no common sense.  
“I can show you a way to fold your shirts so that they take up less space. The wardrobes in here are pretty small, aren’t they?” He did his best to maintain a friendly, helpful expression. Finrod turned. His smile, while bright, now seemed more normal.  
“Thank you very much. I would greatly appreciate the help. I guess I’m not used to… this sort of thing,” he trailed off, clearly searching for a way to avoid saying “I have servants who do this for me.”  
After a companionable fifteen minutes of taking everything off Finrod’s shelves and refolding it, Finrod cheerfully humming under his breath, Beren plucked up the courage to ask what Finrod was studying. “Oh, I’m taking philosophy and anthropology for now, and I think music for a third.”  
This led to a conversation about music, during which Beren learned that Finrod played the viola. “My case is around here somewhere,” Finrod said, sifting through Luis Vuitton-stamped leather in an effort to find it. Beren admitted to having never heard a viola, so Finrod played a bit for him, which sounded at least to Beren’s ears, to be rather impressively good. He had said as much, but Finrod had brushed him off. “My viola playing is just a pet project of mine. My parents want me to become a concert pianist.”  
They spent the half hour before dinner searching through St. Tilion’s storied hall looking for a piano. Eventually Finrod found one, and at Beren’s request, sat down and played so well that Beren was frankly astonished. Several nearby people came out of their rooms to listen. Finrod had smiled and introduced himself and Beren to all of them, but when they all went off to dinner, he hung back with Beren. “I’m not all that fond of crowds,” he said quietly, that irrepressible smile still in place. “Despite having spent most of my life on display.” Beren had smiled and nodded back, unsure of whether his roommate was trying to flirt with him or merely attempting to be friendly. 

Over the next few months, Beren learned many more interesting things about his roommate, namely that he seemed to be able to play any instrument he picked up, including, on one memorable occasion, a digeridoo. He was always dressed to perfection, and no matter how windy and miserable Abenthey’s weather got, his hair never looked out of place. He occasionally spoke like a character from a Regency romance, and he was so friendly and charming that half the university was in love with him. Despite all this attention, however, he preferred to spend his time with a group of other philosophy students, who drank a lot of strangely-named European liquors and stayed up until four in the morning debating the merits of transcendentalism, or with the actual hippies who held drum circles on the Principal’s Lawn every Saturday morning and held vegetarian potlucks and recycling drives, (as opposed to the Rich Hippies who wore thrift store clothes and hung about the town’s most hipster coffee shop acting as though their parents didn’t run Fortune 500 companies).  
He also ended up spending quite a lot of time with Beren. This was normal, at first, given that they were both Freshers and roommates, but then, instead of drifting apart as Beren expected, they started seeing even more of each other. Finrod’s Actual Hippie Friends overlapped a fair bit with Beren’s Vegetarian Society and Mountaineering Club friends, and some of Beren’s medic friends knew Finrod’s philosophy friends through halls or high school.  
And Beren woke up one morning to find Finrod perched on top of his desk, scribbling madly in his notebook (probably writing poetry about the sunrise) and waiting to go running with him and realized that they were friends. Finrod still had a worrisomely charming smile, but once you were used to it, the gleam became much less effective. And Beren was becoming more confident in his own abilities. It turned out that he was much better at medicine than he’d feared. And of course, he had met Luthien. 

In fact, they were now only a week out from meeting Luthien in Doriath. Beren hadn’t even heard of Doriath until he met Luthien (not that he was planning on ever telling her that), but she had described it as a beautiful kingdom of lush forests and soaring mountains, nestled among the Alps. And it turned out that according to the internet and Beren’s European classmates, who seemed to have been to every single country in Europe from the way they talked about it, Doriath was known as the Hidden Kingdom of Europe, often overlooked for its small size and remote, difficult to access location, as well as their tight border security. Unlike most countries in Europe, Doriath required a visa, and they were notoriously picky about it. Beren had been convinced that there was no way they’d allow a random orphaned American med student into their country just to hang out with his girlfriend. Finrod had been unconcerned, but Beren figured that the son of an Earl could probably get into any country he wanted. When he had shared his concerns with Luthien, she had laughed and told him not to worry. “I’ll take care of it, sweetheart,” she said. “I know some people in the customs office.”  
When he had later thought to ask how she knew people in the customs office, she shrugged. “It’s a small country. Everyone knows everyone. You did put me on your forms as your sponsor, right?”  
“Of course I did,” he said. “Those forms were crazy. Your country doesn’t mess around. My application for a student visa in the UK was way less intense than that, and I’m only going to be in the country for ten days.”  
Luthien smiled. “Doriath has faced threats of invasion constantly since its founding. We’ve discovered that the best way around it is to be very particular about who we let in.”  
“Clearly.” 

Beren was looking forward to Doriath. A real shower, a break from walking ten miles a day, and time with Luthien, who he had missed. It had been impossible to text or call most of the time he and Finrod had been traveling, since they were well out of cell tower range. He had sent a few postcards, but it wasn’t the same as talking to her, hearing that melodious accent that was impossible to trace. He supposed he should have done more research about her homeland, but he had been swamped at the end of the year between exams and planning for the trip. He did know he wanted to visit Menegroth, the capital city, which was known for its massive caverns. Apparently, parts of the city were carved into the mountain, including the royal palace. The caves were said to have some of the most beautiful carvings in the world, and they were still being added to and lived in.  
Beren whiled away the hours in a vague, daydream-y haze, imagining strolling the sunlit streets with Luthien. Perhaps because of this, he and Finrod made excellent time, and passed the hut where they had intended to spend the night. They figured they could camp out in the open easily enough. The part of the Alps they were in was one of the few that allowed tent camping, and they were both looking forward to the opportunity to have a night under the stars. Finrod was already talking about constellations and stargazing, inspiring only vague “uh huh’s” from Beren, who was still thinking about Luthien. 

As they set up camp, it started to cloud over. Finrod was disappointed. “We would have finally been able to see Draco,” he said with a sigh, carefully setting up rocks for a firepit. Beren nodded, still not really paying attention. As they settled down to sleep a few hours later, Finrod still put out about the missed stargazing opportunity, they heard the patter of rain beginning to fall on their tent. Beren realized briefly that he had forgotten to check the weather report for the day when they passed the hut. But by the time it occurred to him that this might have been a problem, he was almost asleep. The sound of the rain was soothing, after all. Nothing to worry about. 

They were woken an hour later by the crack of thunder. Neither of them were terribly concerned; they had pitched their tent away from any trees that might drop broken branches on them during a storm, they had a waterproof tent that they had secured to the ground with all the proper pegs and guidelines, and it was June. It wasn’t going to snow or anything. 

When Beren woke up again, a few hours later, it was in a very cold, very wet tent. With all his soaking wet gear piled on top of him. In confusion, he shifted, trying to move some of the weight off of himself. In doing so, he discovered that some of the weight was actually Finrod, who, while lighter than he appeared, was still uncomfortably heavy. The movement woke Finrod, who mumbled something in confusion and tried to push himself upright until Beren cried out in pain from Finrod’s elbow in his stomach, at which point Finrod sighed and collapsed on top of him again.  
“I suppose there are worse ways to wake up,” he said, smiling down at Beren. His smile gleamed even in the darkness.  
Beren frowned up at him, unimpressed. “I feel like I’m lying in the snow,” he said, grumpily. “And you’re on top of me.”  
Finrod felt around for a flashlight. “Ugh, why is it wet?” he asked, retrieving one from his pack. “Did our tent leak?”  
He switched on the light, promptly blinding Beren. “Manwe, Fin, don’t shine it into my eyes!”  
“Sorry, sorry,” Finrod said hastily, shining the light elsewhere. It fell on what remained of their tent. Everything was soaked, probably because of the wide tear near the top of the tent, and the rain, which continued to fall outside. Of course, the tear was now on the side of their tent, because several of the poles had snapped and now hung at odd angles, sending the whole tent sagging to one side. And, worst of all, it became apparent that the reason everything had fallen on top of Beren was because the tent was now on a steep slope.  
Beren, blinking to regain his vision, said with some feeling, “Fuck.”  
“I couldn’t agree more,” Finrod replied. “I suppose one of us should crawl out and assess the situation.”  
After some fumbling around in the wet nylon, they found the zipper to what had been their tent’s opening. Finrod, the slimmer and more flexible of the pair, shimmied his way out with the flashlight.  
“Well,” he said after a minute, “this doesn’t bode well.” 

Their tent was now on a steep slope, held only in place by the lines that had become tangled around some bushes. It was still raining, and they had several hours until dawn, with soaked gear and a useless tent. It would be near-suicidal to try and climb a steep, unknown slope, probably made slippery and unstable by the heavy rain, in the dark. So Beren and Finrod resigned themselves to waiting, huddled in the thicket their tent had become tangled in, trying to stay warm. To bring an extra dose of pain to the situation, the thicket was full of thorns, which scratched them every time they moved. The had fished out their rain gear and donned it, but it was already wet through and offered minimal help. When dawn finally came, they had resolved to hike back to the hut they had passed and from there, down into the valley, to buy food and get a new tent. Beren was already calculating how many hours he’d have to work to pay Finrod back for this. Unfortunately, when the sun finally rose, casting a weak light through continuing drizzle, a few steps out of the thicket revealed that going back was not an option.  
The rain had completely destabilized the hillside. The path they had been on was gone, and the hill was a slick mess of mud and rocks, garnished with the occasional uprooted tree or bush. “How did this not wake us up?” Beren asked, staring at it in disbelief.  
Finrod shrugged. Even covered in mud and thorn bush scratches, he still managed to look elegant doing it, which was frankly ridiculous. They cut their tent free as best they could and struggled up the hillside, falling more than once. When they finally emerged onto solid ground, neither of them had any idea where they were. Normally, Beren could navigate using the sun, but the clouds were too thick to see exactly where it was. He had lost his compass, and his phone was useless. They struggled on as best they could, their direction chosen for them by whatever ground looked least likely to slide out from under their feet. Beren had no idea what they were going to do if they didn’t find somewhere to stay, or at least a marked trail, by sundown. They didn’t have a tent, and the rain had not let up. Most of their food was now inedible. These were the sort of conditions that had caused his parents’ death five years ago. (Beren, in his panic, had neglected to consider that his parents had also been caught in a blizzard, which was unlikely to occur in the Alps in June, though of course, not impossible.) 

As the sun began to set, they saw lights in the distance. “It must be the next hut!” Beren said, with no small amount of relief. Finrod agreed, and they gratefully made their way toward the lights.  
But as they approached, it became clear that there were way too many lights for a simple hiker’s hut. The building they were heading for was massive. And the lights flickered oddly, almost as if it were lit by candles or torches instead of electricity. As they got closer, they could just make out the outlines of towers and turrets in the gathering darkness. The castle loomed above them, itself loomed above by the peaks behind it. The ground around it was littered with boulders, almost as though the mountains and the castle had been playing catch.  
“Fin, did you see anything about a castle around here on the maps?” Beren asked.  
Finrod shook his head. “Nothing. I may have missed it, though.”  
Beren frowned. Finrod, for all his politeness, did not miss things. He had a near-photographic memory. “What are the odds that the clearly inhabited massive fuck-off castle in the middle of the mountains with no visible roads leading to it is not some sort of Bond-villain-style hideout?”  
Finrod sighed. “You watch too many movies. There are plenty of people who have unlisted estates to avoid media attention.”  
“This is going pretty far to avoid attention, Fin.”  
“Nonsense. It’s probably only an hour from the nearest town by helicopter. Perfectly reasonable. My parents were looking into a place like this a few years back.”  
As Beren rolled his eyes yet again at the general over-the-top poshness of Finrod’s life, there were footsteps behind them.  
“If you’re quite finished, gentlemen, I was about to invite you to dinner,” said a voice not unlike Finrod’s. Of course, where Finrod’s voice was bright, frequently seeming to spill over with sunshine, this voice purred like a cat, inviting, but with an underlying threat.  
Beren turned, and then, dazzled and unsure of what he was seeing, blinked several times.  
He had good reason to be dazzled. The man—at least, he was reasonably certain this was a human— (a year ago he would have laughed at himself for thinking like this, but since meeting Finrod and Luthien, and several of Finrod’s siblings, he was inclined to be flexible on this point) was wearing a truly eye-watering number of diamonds, and an impeccable suit in a searing shade of metallic red. His long, auburn hair cascaded in waves past his waist, interwoven with strings of jewels in every shade of red and orange. And he was wearing dark sunglasses, even though night had just fallen.  
“Well met, Finrod Finarfinion,” the man continued. “I have always wanted to meet a scion of Finwe… socially.”  
Finrod bowed politely. Beren, unsure, followed suit. “And your companion, of course,” the man went on. “You both look as though you could use some time to freshen up. Dinner will be at nine. The boys will show you the way.” And then he vanished, disappearing before their eyes. Beren took a deep breath. Excellent. He was hallucinating already.  
He turned to Finrod, but Finrod was already shouldering his pack and setting off towards the castle. Sighing, Beren followed suit. If Finrod didn’t seem phased, then maybe he wasn’t hallucinating after all. He would just have to roll with the punches, he told himself. Like meeting Finrod’s family. That had been a similarly odd and unsettling experience, and he had come out of that just fine. He was even relatively certain they liked him. At least, Finrod’s little sister always said hello to him too when she called her brother. She also made uncanny predictions about his life, but Beren had learned to accept that Galadriel was just a really perceptive kid. Apparently, she was also friends with Luthien, which might explain her interest in him.  
He promptly forgot about this when they finally reached the doors of the castle, which were flung wide open to receive them. It was even more imposing close up. Beren had pictures of plenty of castles, and even seen a few in person during his time at Abenthey. None of them loomed quite the same way this one did. And none of them were filled with the number of dogs that seemed to occupy this one. In fact, it appeared that there were no people at all inhabiting the castle, just massive, wolf-life dogs everywhere he looked. Beren was fond of dogs, but these puppies did not look friendly. Several of them were snarling in a manner that suggested they would happily tear his face off. As he and Finrod stood uncertainly in the courtyard, surrounded by what seemed more and more likely to be semi-tame wolves, someone human finally appeared. Or perhaps it would have been fairer to say someone humanoid appeared, as Beren was even more doubtful about the humanity of this individual. He felt sort of rude labelling people as inhuman; something about it felt vaguely eugenicist, but no human being had canine teeth like that, or glowing yellow eyes. Either this man had had some substantial plastic surgery, or he was, in fact, not a man. Beren was left with little time to wonder, as the person waved a hand at all the wolf-dogs, causing them to relax and wander off, and then led them through the corridors at a lope. As they scrambled to keep up, Beren glanced at Finrod. But his friend’s eyes were focused straight ahead, fixed on their guide, and Beren was unable to get his attention.  
They were ushered to their rooms without conversation, although they passed several more wolf-dogs in the halls, most of whom simply watched them with their cold, feral eyes. In his room, Beren sat heavily on the bed, his tired eyes hardly taking in the stark décor. Everything seemed to have been made of black rock, including, upon reflection, the bed, which had an incredibly firm mattress. In a less menacing house, he would have passed it all off as an Avant Garde design choice, some crazy billionaire’s playground, but in this setting, it just felt ominous.  
The room was warm, however, and there was a strong smell of incense drifting from some unseen source. Beren considered going over to Finrod’s room to ask how he was doing, since he had seemed off earlier, but regardless of the rock-like beds, he needed a nap right now. Just a fifteen-minute power nap, he told himself, setting his watch alarm. There would still be an hour until dinner. 

When Beren awoke, it was not to the beeping of his watch alarm, which had mysteriously turned itself off, but to the sound of Finrod’s voice. He opened his eyes and found that he may as well have kept them closed, as they were in total darkness. “Finrod, I’m here,” he said, reaching out into the dark for his friend. A hand hit him in the chin, and then the nose, before finally settling on his shoulder.  
“Sorry, sorry,” Finrod said, patting his friend’s shoulder.  
“Where are we?” Beren asked, putting a hand out and feeling a cold, slightly slimy stone wall.  
“If I had to guess, I’d say the castle dungeon.”  
Beren sighed heavily. Why couldn’t this have been some stupid rich person house instead of an actual castle with actual dungeons?  
“Any idea why?” he asked, hoping the answer was ‘maybe this guy is just nuts.’  
“I would imagine that we are being held captive, hopefully for ransom,” came Finrod’s answer, though he sounded pained.  
No one is going to pay ransom money for me, Beren thought. But he said nothing. “Are you alright?” he asked instead, not liking the note of tension in Finrod’s voice that had been present all evening.  
“Fine, fine,” Finrod said with mock cheer. “Having the time of my life.”  
Beren decided not to pry. “Do you know who the guy who owns this place is? Or why he would try to hold us hostage in his basement?”  
Though he couldn’t see, Beren could feel Finrod’s shoulders slump. “My family has many enemies,” he said bleakly. “It is unsurprising that one should choose to ransom me. I should never have suggested we come here.”  
Beren tried not to let his frustration show. “But do you know who this guy is?”  
“If he is who I think he is, he’s the right-hand man to the world’s most powerful criminal. This man commands armies of mercenaries, traffics people and drugs all over the world, and has stolen more money than he knows what to do with. I don’t know what his real name is, but we call him—”  
“Sauron. They call me Sauron,” a new voice said, as the room suddenly flared into light. The man who had greeted them outside was there again, although this time the sparkling suit had been exchanged for extremely well-tailored grey trousers and a burgundy button down. There were still strings of diamonds in his hair, which he had flipped over to reveal shaved sides. “How are we, gentlemen?”  
Beren and Finrod simply stared at him.  
“I’ll take that as a ‘fine, thank you very much’,” Sauron said, lounging against the stone wall of the dungeon as though it wasn’t dripping with damp. “I did promise you young men dinner, did I not?”  
Before they could respond, he clapped his hands and several wolves trotted into the room, plates of food balanced on their backs with huge domed covers. With near-human grace, one of them unburdened the others, standing on its hind legs and using its forelimbs to lift each plate onto a scratched wooden table in the corner. Sauron clapped again, and the wolves obediently trotted back out, the heavy door swinging shut behind them. “Now, I’m sure you bright boys knew this already, but I am unfortunately going to need to hold you for ransom.” He spoke in the manner one might use with a three-year-old, pouting exaggeratedly at them. “Your family has caused me far too much trouble over the years, Arafinwinion, and I would love to enact some manner of revenge. And I think your father already knows I like my revenge paid in cash. Unlike my master, who prefers it in blood. I suppose you boys are lucky you got me instead.” He smiled, blindingly handsome, much the same way Finrod had been when Beren first met him. But this smile was vicious, full of the promise of pain and the delight its owner would take in causing it. “As much as I would love to hear you scream, if your family pays up quickly, I will allow them the privilege of having you back in one piece.”  
He turned to leave.  
“Oh,” he said over his shoulder. “Your little friend will be extra. If the house of Finwe can’t see fit to extend him the generosity, I think he’d make a nice new plaything for my master.”  
With that, he vanished again, despite the fact that the door was right in front of him. This time, however, the light in the room did not vanish with him.  
Beren cautiously made his way over to the table, Finrod following slowly behind. “How likely is it that he would poison the food?” Beren asked, moving to lift one of the domes.  
“If he’s holding us for ransom, he needs us alive,” Finrod said. “It won’t be poisoned. It might be…” he trailed off as Beren lifted the lid, revealing the contents of the plate, “inedible.”  
Sure enough, the meat in front of them was clearly raw, still bloody, and with tufts of fur sticking off of it in a few places. Beren gagged and hastily replaced the dome. He was vegetarian for a reason.  
Finrod lifted all the other lids quickly. They were empty, save for one, which contained a single piece of paper. Finrod carefully picked it up. Beren stood on tiptoe to read over his shoulder.  
It was from a speech made by Finrod’s grandfather, condemning Sauron’s criminal enterprises and stating that his family would give nothing to Sauron or his master. “My children know the risks,” it read. “But this family is committed to the fight against evil, wherever it may come.”  
“He’s trying to frighten us,” Finrod said tiredly. “Reminding me of my grandfather’s refusal to negotiate with anyone from Morgoth’s criminal enterprises. It’s a petty trick.”  
At Beren’s confused frown, he explained. “My grandfather died three years ago, and my father and uncle are much more willing to work with some of Morgoth’s smaller contractors to get at him. They will be unlikely to hesitate about paying a ransom if it gets me out and establishes contact with Sauron at the same time.” He thought for a moment. “The only one who might put up a fuss is Uncle Feanor. He was a big proponent of many of grandfather’s harsher methods. He’ll probably try to block my parents from using family funds to pay my ransom. And yours, of course,” he added. “The lawyers will figure it out eventually.”  
Neither of them said what Sauron had hinted. They didn’t have enough time for eventually. 

Despite the darkness, which returned shortly after they read the note, and the steady sound of water dripping down the slimy stone walls, Beren was exhausted enough that even the fear of torture couldn’t prevent him from curling up on the driest part of the floor and falling asleep. He slept fitfully, continually waking to the sound of heavy doors slamming, wolves howling, and the occasional scream. It would seem that they weren’t the only people wasting away in Sauron’s dungeons. Throughout all of it, Finrod remained sitting on the floor next to Beren’s head, wide awake and watching the door. Beren offered to stand guard and allow his friend to sleep, but Finrod refused. Beren had no energy to argue and merely went back to sleep.  
Eventually, the sounds died down, and Beren managed some deeper sleep. At first, his dreams were confused, a jumble of the past few days of hiking and snarling wolves, but eventually they resolved themselves into a familiar image. It was Luthien.  
She looked much as she had the day she and Beren met. He had been hiking in the forest near Abenthey, much as he did every Wednesday afternoon, since he didn’t have class, when he heard someone singing. Whoever it was had the most beautiful voice Beren had ever heard, and a truly incredible range. He knew that Abenthey had one of the best music programs in the UK, but surely somebody this good would be a professional already? Perhaps it was someone professional who had come to film a music video in the forest. The woods around Abenthey were known for their picturesque, fairy-tale beauty, after all.  
Curious, and enchanted by the voice, Beren crept towards it, his well-trained feet silent in the undergrowth. Then he stopped, frozen, staring at the sight before him. In a sunlit clearing, a woman danced, singing to herself all the while in a wordless song that seemed to accompany her movements perfectly as she leapt and spun, her dress twirling around her as her long hair streamed like a curtain of black silk. He could not say how long he stood there, powerless to do anything but watch her. Eventually, however, she noticed him. She stopped, mid-note, and the spell that had held him still suddenly broke. “I’m sorry,” he said, embarrassed to have been staring at this woman for who knew how long. “Your voice is just so beautiful…” he trailed off as the girl stared at him. She took several steps towards him, grey eyes locked with his the entire time. Then, quick as a startled deer, she turned and ran. He followed as best as he could, but she was incredibly fast, and he lost her in the trees. He wandered around for a while, trying to find her so he could apologize more fully, but after an hour, he gave up and made his way back to the parking lot where the bus that would take him back into town would come.  
To his surprise, sitting in the same parking lot with an air of embarrassment was the girl he had tried so hard to find. She startled when she saw him, but then she looked at the ground hurriedly, blushing. He sat beside her on the lone bench by the bus stop and did likewise.  
“Sorry about earlier,” he said to the Scottish dirt.  
“I’m sorry too,” she said to a nearby twig. “I just didn’t hear you coming and you scared me, appearing out of the brush like that.”  
“I just wanted to tell you that you’re an amazing dancer and you have the best singing voice I’ve ever heard,” he said, addressing a leaf.  
“Thank you,” she replied, finally looking up from the ground. “You must a talented woodsman; I can usually hear someone coming ages before I see them.”  
Beren looked her in the eyes and once again felt himself falling. Then she looked away and the feeling stopped.  
“What’s your name?” he asked.  
“Luthien,” she said, smiling. “What’s yours?”  
“Beren Barahirsson. Are you a student at Abenthey? I’ve never seen you around before.”  
“I don’t leave the music building very much,” she said with a laugh. “I’m sort of a hermit. And I don’t live in halls, so I never really see anyone who isn’t in class with me.”  
“What are you studying? Other than music, I mean.”  
“Dance and psychology. Yourself?”  
“I’m a medic,” he said, “So I’m sort of a hermit as well.” This was a frequent joke among Abenthey students; the School of Medicine was on the edge of town, a fifteen-minute walk from the other university buildings.”  
“Do you live in halls?”  
“Yeah, St. Tilion’s. My roommate is Finrod Arafinwinion. He studies music too.”  
“Oh, I know Finrod,” she said, with a smile that promised some interesting stories. “He’s my third cousin twice-removed or something like that and our parents are in the same circles. We used to hang out at parties to avoid his cousins, although these days I’m closer with his sister. Have you met Galadriel?”  
“Only over Facetime. She seems… precocious.”  
Luthien smiled in amusement had his description. “Her parents have been sending her to stay with us every summer for the past three years. My mom has a reputation for shaping bright young minds, and Galadriel is her star student.”  
They had sat and talked until the bus arrived, and then on the bus, and then for an hour on the lawn afterwards, while Luthien wove late-blooming flowers into crowns for them. And then somehow, two months later, they were dating.  
Tonight, he dreamed of Luthien, dancing and singing in the trees once again. But this time, when she noticed him, instead of turning to run, she walked towards him silently, until she could whisper in his ear. When Beren woke up, he still heard those three words ringing like a bell.  
“I’m coming. Hope.” 

Because of the strange dream he’d had, Beren was a little less surprised that he otherwise would have been when, three hours later, he heard the sounds of a commotion going on outside their door. The click of wolf and dog claws on the stones, which could be heard from time to time, suddenly became a rush, with seemingly every guard in the dungeons heading towards a central point. There were barks and growls and the occasional howl, and the sound of prison doors banging shut, and then what might have been dogs going up stairs. Finrod was finally asleep, having consented to rest when Beren woke up and saw how utterly destroyed his friend looked, so Beren sat on the floor, wondering what was happening. He could hear what sounded like an alarm going off in the distance, probably several floors above them, and then the very foundations of the castle began to shake. It was like an earthquake that never ended, the ground just humming in low harmony with the stone. And then the vibrations grew louder, and Beren could hear every individual stone thrumming like a plucked string. There was a distinctive clunk, and the door to their cell swung open. Beren, sensing that staying underground during an… earthquake? Earth jam session? was not a good idea, and deciding that he would rather face the wolves than be crushed to death when his cell door was wide open, reached over to wake up Finrod. Finrod didn’t wake. Beren tried again, shaking him and calling his name, but to no avail. Whatever his friend had stayed up all night fighting against had finally gotten the better of him. Beren could still feel a pulse, and he was still clearly breathing, so he hefted Finrod over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and headed for the door. Fortunately, for all his height, Finrod was strangely light, and it wasn’t too much trouble for Beren to carry him up the nearest stairwell he could find, treading carefully on the buzzing stone.  
Beren kept taking stairs up until he found a window, which revealed to him that he was on the second floor. Huffing in annoyance (and with the effort of carrying someone up four flights of shaking stairs), he went back down one flight and did his best to find a door. He could hear chaos outside; wolves snarling, voices shouting orders, running feet and paws, but the window had looked out over the moat, not the courtyard, and he couldn’t see what was happening. Eventually he found a door, but it seemed to be barred from the outside, and the vibrations had done nothing to shake the bar loose. He was just about to try and find a window to heave both of them out of when there were sounds of a brief struggle outside the door. Then the door itself simply came off its hinges, caving in on itself from a tremendous blow. Wolves scampered away from the door, yelping in fear as Beren stepped back into the morning light. Half the courtyard was on fire, and people and animals ran in all directions. The stone was still shaking out here, but it was less noticeable. Beren picked his way over rubble and made for the gate, which was wide open. Nobody noticed two humans slipping out the main entrance as a large section of the south tower collapsed into the courtyard, sending debris flying everywhere. Across the drawbridge, which helpfully lowered itself as Beren approached, there was a hive of activity; men and women in military uniforms were setting up medical tents and forming barricades with a precision Sauron’s forces had definitely lacked. As Beren headed towards them, doing his best to keep his hands raised while carrying Finrod, two of them dashed out to meet him with a stretcher.  
“Beren Barahirsson,” he said, when asked to identify himself. He reached for his passport, only to realize that it, with the rest of his belongings, was currently Manwe-knew-where inside the castle. But the soldiers simply placed Finrod on the stretcher and carried him towards one of the tents, directing Beren to a large cluster of rocks some way away from their camp, from which the vibrations that shook the air and earth seemed to be emanating.  
As Beren approached, he could make out distinctive sounds; a song at once beautiful and terrifying. It wasn’t loud, but the power in the singer’s voice kept the world around him moving, everything singing out in harmony with the singer until the whole world was like a deadly choir. When Beren reached the rocks, however, the singing stopped, cut off suddenly. A sharp squeal rent the air instead, and Beren distantly heard several screams from inside the castle. “BEREN!” shouted a joyful voice, and he nearly fell backwards as someone flung themself into his arms. He instinctively wrapped his jubilant attacker in a tight hug, burying his face in her hair. “Luthien,” he whispered, holding her close, his face breaking out in a wide smile.  
She kissed him, once, twice, three times, and then started talking about a thousand things at once. “Finrod’s probably asleep right now,” she said unconcerned. “It’s pretty exhausting keeping your mind open for someone all night, and he doesn’t have as much practice as Galadriel and I do.” Beren decided not to try and decode that remark right away, instead focusing on the fact that Finrod would apparently be fine after about twelve hours of sleep. “There were other people imprisoned in that castle,” he told her seriously, “We could hear them being tortured.”  
Luthien’s bright smile turned steely. “The soldiers are preparing to go in and launch a rescue operation,” she said, gesturing to the tents. “They got here a little later than I would have liked, but hopefully they’ll still be in time to get everyone out safely. The dungeons are mostly on the north side, from what I could tell, so I thought it best to bring down the south tower as a distraction.”  
“You brought down the tower?” Beren asked, incredulous. “I thought that was some sort of bomb.”  
Luthien laughed. “Beren, haven’t you always said I had a powerful voice? I was the one who unlocked your cell and broke down the door into the courtyard for you. Mother and father will be furious that I didn’t wait for backup, but I wasn’t sure how much time you had.”  
Beren decided to also ignore the fact that his girlfriend’s voice could cause earthquakes and that she seemed to have control over an army, and focused on his next question.  
“How did you know where we were? And how did you get here? I thought you were in Monaco or Greece or something?”  
Luthien shrugged. “I was in Greece. But I was with Celegorm and Curufin when they got the news about their cousin’s kidnapping. Celegorm spent half the night shouting on the phone with his father about why the family shouldn’t pay your ransom money and the other half of the night leering at me and asking if my boyfriend being kidnapped meant that I was available. And Curufin, the little slime ball, gleefully informed me that Sauron had you. It wasn’t too hard to decide what to do from there.”  
“But how did you get here from Greece?” Beren asked. “I know Europe isn’t very big, but it isn’t that small. And how did you know where exactly this place was?”  
Luthien smiled. “There are some advantages to being able to fly private.”  
Beren sighed. Luthien was so generally down-to-earth that it was easy to forget that she had the ability to hop on a plane whenever she wanted.  
“And as for how I found you, Huan helped me. Actually, I should check on him. He didn’t like my singing, poor baby.”  
She whistled with surprising force, and before long, a beautiful Bernese mountain dog came trotting around some rocks. “Hello, Huan,” Luthien said, reaching out to scratch him behind the ears. He leaned into the touch, showing off a big doggy grin.  
“He’s the best tracking dog in the world, probably,” she said, bending down to hug him. “He can find anyone.”  
Beren came over to give Huan his fair share of affection, as a thank you for finding them. But as he stroked the dog’s glossy back, something occurred to him. “Doesn’t Celegorm have a Bernese mountain dog that goes everywhere with him?” he asked. He seemed to remember the dog from Celegorm and Curufin’s disastrous visit to Finrod at Abenthey.  
Luthien looked a little shamefaced. “Luthien, did you steal Celegorm’s dog?”  
“I didn’t steal him, he chose to accompany me. I finished pumping Finrod’s idiot cousins for information and called for the car to take me to the airport so I could come find you. Huan came and stood with me while I waited and when I got in the car, he just followed. It’s not my fault Celegorm’s dog likes me better than him.”  
Beren, for the first time in thirty-six hours, laughed heartily. 

After spending the next few hours cuddling with his girlfriend and her newfound dog, Beren was feeling much better about his life. The news that Finrod was awake and refusing to sleep any more until he saw them both only improved his mood.  
“Hey Ingo,” Luthien said, giving him a one-armed hug as she sat beside him on the cot.  
“Hey yourself, Tinuviel,” he replied, hugging her back. “Nice rescue.”  
Beren sat himself on the other side of the folding cot, causing it to creak ominously under their combined weight. “It’s good to see you awake,” he said, hugging Finrod in turn. Finrod nodded. “I could say the same for you.”  
For a moment the three of them sat in silence, reflecting on the past few days. Then Huan came bounding in and shoved his head onto the cot to nose at Finrod’s bare feet.  
“Luthien,” Finrod said, with a smile playing around the corners of his mouth. “Did you steal my cousin’s dog?”  
“I… borrowed him,” she said. “Possibly permanently.”  
Huan barked joyously in agreement, coming over to lay his head in Luthien’s lap.  
“I suppose your father will be thrilled?” Finrod said, grinning.  
“Of course he will be. He hates your uncle. And now your whole family owes him because I rescued you. He’ll be delighted.”


End file.
